‘Creating a better future starts with the ability to envision it,’ was written on the poster in the
admissions office. The picture showed the open ocean at dawn, and with a little imagination it
looked like Buffalo’s downtown marina. If you went up to the lighthouse, Lake Erie seemed just
as vast as the sea.
I had a job sitting in a booth and giving information to visitors and prospective students, who
were all eager to imagine their dorm life, the parties, the jobs they would get after graduation. It
was already August and I had been offered to stay on as a junior advisor. While my own future
still seemed foggy to me, my present had started to take shape. The year before I had finally
finished my degree in American Studies with the help of my mother, who had paid my debts so I
could enroll again. I had an apartment, an old car, and a counselor. I was twenty-eight.
Our office had no windows, but during lunch break, I sat on the blue or brown chairs of the
cafeteria and stared out the window where the students were walking by and talked to each
other about the classes they were taking. They were guys from the Bulls team, who had to make
up for missed or failed classes, and girls with the tiniest tops and pierced belly buttons. They
knew they had a place in life nobody could take away from them, because their parents were
proud of them or even not so proud, but they all knew that college was their time. They
discovered sex and lots of sex and they giggled as they told their friends who they had been
making out with last night and everyone’s mouth had whipped cream smeared all over from
eating this huge college cake that was their life.
Maybe it was the poster that reminded me of Grandma. When my grandparents were still alive,
Grandma often told fairy-tales to me she had learned in her childhood in Europe, but none as
frequent as “The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs.” After my grandfather’s death, she moved
into our house in Kenmore. Many nights she would pack a bag and beg my father in her old
language to take her away, to leave the house behind and escape. We wouldn’t survive until we
kept moving.
When Grandmother was a young woman in East Prussia and heard the rumors of the Russian
army advancing, she packed all her things and took her two kids and left the village where her
family had lived for five generations, and – her husband shot dead in the early years of the war –
she didn’t stop until she reached the ocean.
Even in the New World, she never lost the feeling that she had to escape, and when she grew
old, my parents often left the house at night to search for her, who was meandering among the
houses in North Buffalo. In later years, grandmother managed to go downtown. Maybe she took
the bus, maybe someone felt that she was lost and gave her a ride. The police found her in
LaSalle Park, opposite of the Lighthouse. When the police found her, they didn’t understand
what she was asking them. By then, she had unlearned English, which she had been able to
speak fluently, and I often laughed at her dark-sounding sentences. She would keep telling me
fairy-tales in her language, and I understood them, because I had listened to them so often.
Mike, my counselor, had a basement office with lots of pillows and strange items such as Whiffle
ball bats, stuffed bears and Barbie dolls, boxing gloves and tennis rackets. Every Tuesday and
Thursday I came to see him. He worked at the community center, which I had visited two years
before to do a variety of tests, from Myers-Briggs to aptitude ones. I was living hand to mouth,
had lost my apartment and my job as a gas station attendant. The social workers had suggested
counseling to “sort things out,” and the center was paying most of the charges.
At first I had no idea what counseling was to do for me. I knew my life was a mess, but I’d
always felt that I was able to manage, that my failures in jobs and in college were only due to
not finding the right thing. But I liked the idea of having a person to talk to. Usually I was talked
to; it always seemed that I was listening to others without adding anything to the conversation.
But Mike was paid to listen to me. I liked the fact that he received money for this. If listening to
me bothered or bored him, at least I wasn’t wasting his time.
Mike had curly dark hair, which was thinning in the front and back. He was short, a bit pudgy, and
wore a smile that I often wanted to take off his face. It was a Garfield smile, coming from behind
gold-rimmed glasses, the smile of a fat, self-satisfied cat who has a solution or a smart answer to
everything. Mike sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, and I heard the minutes ticking away.
He sat quietly, contemplating the next meal or his evening and I was supposed to do the talking.
I had lots to talk about, years of a post-adolescent period with days measured in beer, pot, TV
and dead-end jobs, divorced parents, and money problems, but when I got into those topics he
interrupted me.
“What are you so afraid off?”
“What do you mean?”
“What are you so afraid off?”
“I’m not, well, I’m afraid I’ll have no job...”
And then my speech failed me, and it felt as if I were going far away. He let me sit like that for
a while, then asked what was happening.
The truth was that the better I was doing on the outside, the more depressed I felt. It felt as if
the relative security I had gained over the last year invited schools of piranhas into my thoughts.
Disaffected, my mother said, I had been, spending time observing rather than connecting, but if I
was more connected now, I also felt weakened and anxious.
“Do you know “The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs?”
He didn’t laugh as I had feared, didn’t even flinch. “No,” he said.
“I’m not sure it has anything to do with anything, but somehow it does. I just don’t know how.”
And then I told him the fairy-tale of the young boy who, in order to marry the King’s only
daughter, goes to hell to steal the devil’s three golden hairs. On his way, a ferryman asks the
young hero why he has to row to and fro without ever being released.
The young man finds his way to hell, and the Devil’s grandmother takes a liking to the beautiful
boy and promises to help him. When the Devil comes home at night, she pulls out his hairs in his
sleep. The devil, getting angry at her, is calmed by her assurance that she only pulled his hair
because she is having nightmares. And she asks the devil what the young man has told her
about the ferryman. The devil answers her, and the young man, hidden under a bench, listens
carefully.
So when the young man returns to the ferryboat, he tells the man to put the oars into the hands
of the next client, and he’ll be free.
The ferryman thanks the young man, and it is the King who, after angrily agreeing to the
marriage, and thinking of how to secretly get rid of his daughter’s bridegroom, comes to the
ferryman and asks to be set over the river. The ferryman puts the oars into the King’s hands,
jumps onto the shore and runs away.
“Why are you telling me this?” Mike asked, but not in a nasty way. He asked it matter-of-factly,
he wanted to know.
“The fairy-tale isn’t about the ferryman, but he is the last character shown in the tale, and
somehow he seems more haunted, more important than anybody else. The King is punished for
his vanity, the young man marries the princess and lives happily ever after, but what becomes of
the ferryman?”
“What do you think?”
The question had bothered me as a seven-year old and it bothered me again. I had never been
more than a few weeks away from Buffalo, and even though I could not imagine my future in this
city, I also couldn’t leave. Where had the ferryman gone? When had he gone far enough to feel
that he would never have to go back to the ferryboat? When did he feel safe? How had the
ferryman managed to leave the only place he’d ever known?
I shrugged my shoulders.
“I had a dream about my father,” I finally said. I threw that sentence at him the way you throw a
stick for a dog to fetch. I’d had the dream every other night, and sometimes would wake up
trying to scream. I was naked and my father about to rape me. He was smiling, there was no
aggression visible on his face, only smiling lust. But I was afraid of telling Mike about it. I wasn’t
in the mood for crying or going into my problems. At the same time I didn’t want to steal his time.
I got those sessions for next-to-nothing and I felt guilty whenever I wasn’t really using them.
“What kind of dream?”
“He fucked me.” I had woken up that morning with a scream blocking my throat.
“How did he do that?”
“I’m not going to tell you.” He fell silent, sat quiet across from me until I said, “He held my legs
apart, as if I were a woman, and whispered something nice.” I didn’t stop, just blurted
everything out. When I was done I felt ridiculous and humiliated.
Mike came over to where I sat. He spread my legs and smiled and rubbed his crotch against my
ass. We had an agreement that I could scream and shout and tell him to go to hell, but unless I
said ‘stop’ he would continue with his role-plays. When he started to moan softly and I saw his
big grin, I wanted to tell him to fuck off, to leave me be, but I couldn’t. He played out my dream
and had his way with me and I couldn’t say a word.
admissions office. The picture showed the open ocean at dawn, and with a little imagination it
looked like Buffalo’s downtown marina. If you went up to the lighthouse, Lake Erie seemed just
as vast as the sea.
I had a job sitting in a booth and giving information to visitors and prospective students, who
were all eager to imagine their dorm life, the parties, the jobs they would get after graduation. It
was already August and I had been offered to stay on as a junior advisor. While my own future
still seemed foggy to me, my present had started to take shape. The year before I had finally
finished my degree in American Studies with the help of my mother, who had paid my debts so I
could enroll again. I had an apartment, an old car, and a counselor. I was twenty-eight.
Our office had no windows, but during lunch break, I sat on the blue or brown chairs of the
cafeteria and stared out the window where the students were walking by and talked to each
other about the classes they were taking. They were guys from the Bulls team, who had to make
up for missed or failed classes, and girls with the tiniest tops and pierced belly buttons. They
knew they had a place in life nobody could take away from them, because their parents were
proud of them or even not so proud, but they all knew that college was their time. They
discovered sex and lots of sex and they giggled as they told their friends who they had been
making out with last night and everyone’s mouth had whipped cream smeared all over from
eating this huge college cake that was their life.
Maybe it was the poster that reminded me of Grandma. When my grandparents were still alive,
Grandma often told fairy-tales to me she had learned in her childhood in Europe, but none as
frequent as “The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs.” After my grandfather’s death, she moved
into our house in Kenmore. Many nights she would pack a bag and beg my father in her old
language to take her away, to leave the house behind and escape. We wouldn’t survive until we
kept moving.
When Grandmother was a young woman in East Prussia and heard the rumors of the Russian
army advancing, she packed all her things and took her two kids and left the village where her
family had lived for five generations, and – her husband shot dead in the early years of the war –
she didn’t stop until she reached the ocean.
Even in the New World, she never lost the feeling that she had to escape, and when she grew
old, my parents often left the house at night to search for her, who was meandering among the
houses in North Buffalo. In later years, grandmother managed to go downtown. Maybe she took
the bus, maybe someone felt that she was lost and gave her a ride. The police found her in
LaSalle Park, opposite of the Lighthouse. When the police found her, they didn’t understand
what she was asking them. By then, she had unlearned English, which she had been able to
speak fluently, and I often laughed at her dark-sounding sentences. She would keep telling me
fairy-tales in her language, and I understood them, because I had listened to them so often.
Mike, my counselor, had a basement office with lots of pillows and strange items such as Whiffle
ball bats, stuffed bears and Barbie dolls, boxing gloves and tennis rackets. Every Tuesday and
Thursday I came to see him. He worked at the community center, which I had visited two years
before to do a variety of tests, from Myers-Briggs to aptitude ones. I was living hand to mouth,
had lost my apartment and my job as a gas station attendant. The social workers had suggested
counseling to “sort things out,” and the center was paying most of the charges.
At first I had no idea what counseling was to do for me. I knew my life was a mess, but I’d
always felt that I was able to manage, that my failures in jobs and in college were only due to
not finding the right thing. But I liked the idea of having a person to talk to. Usually I was talked
to; it always seemed that I was listening to others without adding anything to the conversation.
But Mike was paid to listen to me. I liked the fact that he received money for this. If listening to
me bothered or bored him, at least I wasn’t wasting his time.
Mike had curly dark hair, which was thinning in the front and back. He was short, a bit pudgy, and
wore a smile that I often wanted to take off his face. It was a Garfield smile, coming from behind
gold-rimmed glasses, the smile of a fat, self-satisfied cat who has a solution or a smart answer to
everything. Mike sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, and I heard the minutes ticking away.
He sat quietly, contemplating the next meal or his evening and I was supposed to do the talking.
I had lots to talk about, years of a post-adolescent period with days measured in beer, pot, TV
and dead-end jobs, divorced parents, and money problems, but when I got into those topics he
interrupted me.
“What are you so afraid off?”
“What do you mean?”
“What are you so afraid off?”
“I’m not, well, I’m afraid I’ll have no job...”
And then my speech failed me, and it felt as if I were going far away. He let me sit like that for
a while, then asked what was happening.
The truth was that the better I was doing on the outside, the more depressed I felt. It felt as if
the relative security I had gained over the last year invited schools of piranhas into my thoughts.
Disaffected, my mother said, I had been, spending time observing rather than connecting, but if I
was more connected now, I also felt weakened and anxious.
“Do you know “The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs?”
He didn’t laugh as I had feared, didn’t even flinch. “No,” he said.
“I’m not sure it has anything to do with anything, but somehow it does. I just don’t know how.”
And then I told him the fairy-tale of the young boy who, in order to marry the King’s only
daughter, goes to hell to steal the devil’s three golden hairs. On his way, a ferryman asks the
young hero why he has to row to and fro without ever being released.
The young man finds his way to hell, and the Devil’s grandmother takes a liking to the beautiful
boy and promises to help him. When the Devil comes home at night, she pulls out his hairs in his
sleep. The devil, getting angry at her, is calmed by her assurance that she only pulled his hair
because she is having nightmares. And she asks the devil what the young man has told her
about the ferryman. The devil answers her, and the young man, hidden under a bench, listens
carefully.
So when the young man returns to the ferryboat, he tells the man to put the oars into the hands
of the next client, and he’ll be free.
The ferryman thanks the young man, and it is the King who, after angrily agreeing to the
marriage, and thinking of how to secretly get rid of his daughter’s bridegroom, comes to the
ferryman and asks to be set over the river. The ferryman puts the oars into the King’s hands,
jumps onto the shore and runs away.
“Why are you telling me this?” Mike asked, but not in a nasty way. He asked it matter-of-factly,
he wanted to know.
“The fairy-tale isn’t about the ferryman, but he is the last character shown in the tale, and
somehow he seems more haunted, more important than anybody else. The King is punished for
his vanity, the young man marries the princess and lives happily ever after, but what becomes of
the ferryman?”
“What do you think?”
The question had bothered me as a seven-year old and it bothered me again. I had never been
more than a few weeks away from Buffalo, and even though I could not imagine my future in this
city, I also couldn’t leave. Where had the ferryman gone? When had he gone far enough to feel
that he would never have to go back to the ferryboat? When did he feel safe? How had the
ferryman managed to leave the only place he’d ever known?
I shrugged my shoulders.
“I had a dream about my father,” I finally said. I threw that sentence at him the way you throw a
stick for a dog to fetch. I’d had the dream every other night, and sometimes would wake up
trying to scream. I was naked and my father about to rape me. He was smiling, there was no
aggression visible on his face, only smiling lust. But I was afraid of telling Mike about it. I wasn’t
in the mood for crying or going into my problems. At the same time I didn’t want to steal his time.
I got those sessions for next-to-nothing and I felt guilty whenever I wasn’t really using them.
“What kind of dream?”
“He fucked me.” I had woken up that morning with a scream blocking my throat.
“How did he do that?”
“I’m not going to tell you.” He fell silent, sat quiet across from me until I said, “He held my legs
apart, as if I were a woman, and whispered something nice.” I didn’t stop, just blurted
everything out. When I was done I felt ridiculous and humiliated.
Mike came over to where I sat. He spread my legs and smiled and rubbed his crotch against my
ass. We had an agreement that I could scream and shout and tell him to go to hell, but unless I
said ‘stop’ he would continue with his role-plays. When he started to moan softly and I saw his
big grin, I wanted to tell him to fuck off, to leave me be, but I couldn’t. He played out my dream
and had his way with me and I couldn’t say a word.
winter 2007 r.kv.r.y. fiction
BELLE MÈRE by Stefan Kiesbye